“Jessie Buckley is a chameleon of an actress. In the past few years, she’s dyed her naturally brunette hair peroxide blonde, jet black and scarlet.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
In the past few years, she’s dyed her naturally brunette hair peroxide blonde, jet black and scarlet.
She’s swapped her Killarney lilt for the Queen’s English, an American twang and a Glaswegian burr.
She’s played a nurse, an unfaithful mother, a scarecrow, William Shakespeare’s wife and, in a film out later this year, the bride of Frankenstein.
At the age of 36, she’s won an Olivier Award and, this year, won a Critics’ Choice Award, been nominated for a Golden Globe and is expected to be an Oscar contender – she is hotly tipped to win as Best Actress in the upcoming awards season.
Yet few could pick her out of a crowd or pluck her name from a credits list and in the Norfolk village where she lives, she is rarely recognised.
Almost uniquely in the world of showbusiness, she has no Instagram account, never does press calls and hasn’t updated her Facebook page – where she calls herself ‘Messy Jessie’ – since 2020.
When she took to the stage last weekend at the Critics’ Choice Awards in Santa Monica, California, after winning Best Actress for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet, based on the bestselling Maggie O’Farrell novel, many TV viewers had no idea who she was – despite beating the likes of Emma Stone, Amanda Seyfried and Rose Byrne to the title.
This is just the way Jessie likes it.
Deeply private, never courting fame or fortune, she has kept details of her home life, including the full names of her husband and their eight-month-old daughter, hidden from the world.
The Daily Mail discovered this week that Jessie’s husband is Freddie Sorensen, 47, who worked as a producer before leaving the industry to work in mental health.
She is also notoriously careful about the work she chooses, often juggling West End stage shows with low-key television series and film roles in which she can showcase her other passion: music.
Those close to Jessie wonder if there is a reason behind her cautious approach to fame and the way she shuns the spotlight that is inevitably coming her way.
Speaking on Irish radio this week, her father Tim Buckley, a poet and hotel bar manager in the family’s hometown of Killarney, County Kerry, said being in the public eye and speaking on stage at awards ceremonies ‘wouldn’t be her favourite thing’.
He added of his daughter: ‘She has to psych herself like a boxer before going out there.’
For a young woman who left her homeland and family behind aged just 17 to follow her dreams of becoming a star, it seems an unusual attitude, to say the least.
But an explanation for Jessie’s reticence may be found by looking back to her first taste of celebrity.
In 2008, she appeared as a contestant on the BBC talent show I’d Do Anything, overseen by theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, in which she competed against 11 others to play the role of Nancy in a revival of the musical Oliver.
Appearing live on millions of screens across the country every Saturday, the Jessie of 18 years ago is almost unrecognisable.
Shy, baby-faced and painfully naive, with her hair in unruly ringlets, she won the nation over with her jaw-dropping voice, only to lose out in the final to fellow contestant Jodie Prenger, then 28.
At the time, Jessie handled her defeat with good grace, expressing her happiness for Jodie – now a fixture on Coronation Street – and describing the show as ‘an amazing experience’.
But this week, in an interview with Vogue magazine, she revealed much more. Being on the show at just 17, the minimum age limit for contestants, she admits, felt like being ‘brutalised’ – and she hopes no other young woman has to endure an experience like it.
‘[I] was not well fully,’ she explains. ‘I was depressed and I – just wasn’t well. There was a lot that was really messed up.
‘I was growing into my body. I was 17. I was in a moment of discovery. As women, it’s such unfair objectification.
‘But I didn’t recognise it fully at the time. I just felt it, which was difficult.’
Looking back, there were parts of the show that felt, at best, dated – at worst, verging on sexist.
In one scene, after the judges criticised her posture, Jessie was sent to a ‘dancing in heels’ class with the cast of Chicago.
In another, the girls were sent to meet George Clooney, while the boys played football and learned teamwork skills.
Jessie added: ‘When you’re told, culturally, in different ways that you have to kind of mould yourself into a shape that doesn’t naturally fit you, you incubate that messaging and then it becomes self-destructive.
‘Once I realised that, my life goal has been to unravel myself from that sort of miseducation, from stories that don’t actually serve me, and just find life.’
Though her turmoil was unknown at the time, there was uproar when Jessie failed to win – not least from Lord Lloyd Webber himself.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail this week, the composer recalls the first time he met Jessie, who’d been whittled down from 6,000 hopefuls for the live shows.
‘It was very obvious to me that she was much more than a musical theatre talent – or at least a very great one,’ Lloyd Webber says.
‘I’ve seen so many people over the years, and I always remembered her. The one thing about Jessie is that she is a lifeforce. She is a life-enhancer on every level.
‘She radiates joy whenever you meet her.’
He remembers one episode of the show, in which he coached her in singing a Judy Garland song, The Man That Got Away from A Star Is Born, against the advice of producers, who wanted Jessie to take on something more modern.
‘She was phenomenal,’ he says. ‘I remember standing up in the middle of it, and saying: ‘This girl is 17, and she’s performing as well as Garland – if not better.’
Surprisingly, he admits, he was ‘secretly pleased she didn’t win it’.
‘Once the programme was over, I felt I could then really talk to her in another way. My whole advice to her – something that I think she had decided anyway – was to stay clear of musical theatre and go to drama school.
‘In the 60 years I’ve been working professionally, I’ve seen so many girls who are very talented, and maybe also very good actresses, but they get into musical theatre and they get pigeon-holed and they never, ever break out of it.
‘Jessie has transcended that.’
In the years that followed the show, he has kept in touch.
While filming Wild Rose, the musical drama film she starred in alongside Julie Walters in 2018, she popped into his office to play him the accompanying country album over a cup of coffee, and the pair regularly cross paths at restaurants in London and LA.
Lloyd Webber said I’d Do Anything wasn’t the first he had heard of Jessie, though he didn’t meet her until she was on the show.
‘My wife breeds racehorses and has a place in Ireland,’ he explains. ‘Once, when we were over there, all the people in our village were saying: “You’ve got to meet this extraordinary girl.” They said, “She’s only 16 and she’s amazing.” I heard that quite a few times.’
Back in Ireland, her parents, Marina and Tim – who had taken it in turns to fly to London to be in the studio audience each week while one remained in Killarney with their four other children, Killian, Eva, Julia and Lily – couldn’t believe Jessie had become Lloyd Webber’s “golden girl”.
Music is in her blood: Marina is a talented harpist and vocal coach who now works as a music therapist, while Tim is a poet and musician who ran a guest house when Jessie was young.
At the Ursuline Secondary School, an all-girls’ convent in Thurles, County Tipperary, Jessie soon made a name for herself as a budding star.
Mary Butler, formerly president of the Association of Irish Musical Societies and one of her teachers, said: ‘I can remember the first time she auditioned – it was for the male lead in Chess, and she was super.
‘Jessie played all the male roles. We had nobody else who could sing like her.
‘Everything she did, she thought about it. She prepared really well, even for a school show.
‘And when she opened her mouth to sing, oh holy God, your hairs would stand on end.’
Jessie went on to take national music exams in piano, clarinet, saxophone and Irish harp – and was picked from a pool of 40,000 youngsters for the 2001 high achiever award by the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
‘She was clearly a star, even back then,’ says the academy’s Ciara Higgins.
Others to hold the accolade in the past have included the late singer Sinead O’Connor and actor Andrew Scott.
But London – bright lights, bigger prospects – beckoned, and in February 2008, Jessie flew over to audition for the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She got rejected but, on a whim, decided to join those queuing on London’s South Bank for the open auditions for I’d Do Anything.
After the show, and having turned down the chance to play Nancy’s understudy, Jessie stayed in the capital and was cast in a low-budget version of Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Light Music.
‘I was on £300 a week and you can’t even get the Tube in London for that,’ she has said.
She worked as a jazz singer at Mayfair club Annabel’s and as a shop assistant selling cereal to supplement her income.
One night, a mysterious benefactor, by the name of Tony Bernstein, heard her singing and offered to be her patron – paying for her rent, food bills and tuition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
She accepted, calling him ‘an angel’, and went on to graduate from Rada in 2013.
Shortly afterwards, she had lunch with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who recalls Jessie telling him: ‘She said, ‘I’m going to keep my singing voice under wraps from now on. I want to be known as an actress.’
Her acting career blossomed – from starring alongside Jude Law in the West End production of Henry V, to her breakout TV role in the BBC drama War and Peace.
It was on set that she met Grantchester star James Norton, whom she would date for a year.
Hollywood soon came calling: she was nominated for a Bafta Rising Star award for her part in psychological thriller Beast (2017), and later that year starred in Wild Rose, which led to her performing music from the film at Glastonbury festival.
She was nominated for both a Bafta and an Oscar (winning neither) for her role in The Lost Daughter (2021), alongside Olivia Colman, who remains a firm friend. The pair also starred in the comedy Wicked Little Letters in 2024.
Despite being an up-and-comer in the industry, those who know the actress say her feet remain firmly on the ground.
The Buckleys are a close-knit family and are fiercely proud of her – she mentioned her brother, Killian, who has accompanied her to many an awards ceremony, in her speech last Sunday. She has, insists her father, ‘remained herself throughout it all’.
Music – arguably her first love – is not completely off the agenda.
From 2021-2022, Jessie appeared alongside Eddie Redmayne in a West End revival of Cabaret, for which she received rave reviews and won a Best Actress Olivier.
Lord Lloyd Webber admits he would ‘love to work with her’. After all, Jessie has – to date – never been his leading lady.
‘There are so few people who can really, really sing and act as well,’ he says. ‘If she ever wanted to do anything musical, she knows my phone number.’
For now, he knows bigger things are in her sights – not least the Golden Globe awards this weekend, and the Oscars in March, for which the shortlists will be announced on January 22.
‘I’m as confident as anyone could possibly be that she’ll win the Oscar. I can’t believe she won’t,’ says Lloyd Webber.
‘It’s one of the most rewarding things you can have in this profession, to see someone who you know was wonderful to begin with really get to the very top, and I think she’s going to.’
Hamnet – a story about the death of Shakespeare’s son – was filmed in late 2024 and the actress found out she was pregnant with her first child just a few days after stepping off set.
She had married Freddie, whom she met on a blind date through a mutual friend in 2018, the previous year.
Her daughter, name unknown, was born last spring, and today the family split their time between London and a 16th-century manor house in the Norfolk fens.
In an interview last year, she said having a child made her ‘feel alive’.
‘You become more honest and you become more focused about what’s important.’
With all of Hollywood at her feet, only Jessie – who once described herself as ‘a cat that’s had nine different lives’ – knows what reinvention is next.